Two Fridays ago was the first HR Summit held by GHRA (the professional development committee) and I have to say, kudos to them. It was held in the Fawcett Center from noon to four and people from all of Fisher was invited (although it was mostly HR students) as well as HR professionals from around Columbus.

Over lunch we had the opportunity to talk to everyone at the table. It was actually nice to be able to talk to one of the second years that I had never formally met before as well as a professional consultant, who had worked in HR for about ten years before starting his own consulting firm. I also shard a table with Amber, one of the other MLHR bloggers/first years, and an MBA student focused in finance. It was a great experience to talk to other students that I had never really had a chance to talk to before as well as a professional consultant.

After/during lunch, there was a speaker from Cardinal Health, who talked about the health care industry/Cardinal Health. It was interesting to hear his insight into how the new health care bill affects their business and, in turn, how it affects HR professionals. It was great to start with him because what he spoke about was more general HR information, not too much into the specifics. After he spoke, we had a little discussion/activity at our tables. We had the luxury of having a professional consultant at our table, so he helped lead the discussion in terms of where we should start when it came to solving the problem in the mini-case study. I learned so much about consulting in that 30 minutes, than I knew after about a year of the MLHR program, which is not a knock on the program, it just isn’t HR consulting focused. Also, it was interesting to hear from the MBA student at our table who wanted to look at solving the issue from a financial perspective instead of an HR perspective. After the activity we heard from a panel of two professionals, one lady from Nationwide Insurance who focuses on diversity and Steve Russell, the Chief People Officer, at McDonald’s. Both professionals discussed the issue of diversity and how it relates to HR. They answered questions from one of the second year GHRA executive board members about what their company’s definition of diversity was and how they handle diversity. Finally, we had our last speaker from Nationwide, who also summarized what her company does and then lead a discussion about anything we wanted to talk about further.

I certainly hope next year that the new GHRA professional development committee and our new president (hint hint Shawn H.) will continue this tradition.